Blogger Dennis Best, who previously schooled us about the value of built-in Getting Things Done apps, expands on his all-inside-the-Mac thinking by noting a simple way to organise every email message, document, iCal event, or other file. Add the ° character (Shift-Option-8 on Mac keyboards) directly in front of any word you want to track with, and both Spotlight (and, of course, Quicksilver) can quickly catch and sort your keywords for you. Guest poster Nick Santilli suggested a similar metada system using the "&" character, but Dennis' idea tags files by adding only a single, non-intrusive step you can do right inside the text.

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When you just can't seem to hunt down that file you know you've got stowed away somewhere on your Mac, it's time to break out the Spotlight big guns—advanced search operators, that is. Macworld runs down advanced Spotlight operators which will be familiar to power Google searchers. Here's a sampling:

• Enclose phrases in quotes, like "time machine"
  
• Use AND, OR, and NOT to narrow or widen your search, like java NOT coffee or invoice OR bonus
  
• Search by document attributes using operators like author:authorname, kind:pdf (for PDF files), and date:today

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Mac OS X only: When Mac user Adam Wilco heard about Quicksilver's dark future, he set out to add the QS features he uses most to Spotlight. The result is Quicksilver's ExtraScripts ported for use with Spotlight. Once you download these babies and copy them to your Applications folder, you can Sleep, Restart, Empty the Trash, or Toggle Audio right from the Spotlight search box. Of course this doesn't make Spotlight do all the stuff Quicksilver does, but it's a step in that direction. The ExtraScripts Spotlight port is a free download for Mac only.

Mac OS X only: Now that Leopard's got Cover Flow in Finder and a central calendar store, you can search for events and tasks and preview them all big and pretty-like right in Finder. The Mac OS X Hints blog details how. (The two tricks: make sure you use the kind:ical operator and that you include Spotlight items in your search critreria). Neat way for iCal/Mail to-do users to search that data without launching the apps.

Mac OS X Leopard only: Run quick calculations from Leopard's Spotlight search box. Enter your formula and the answer will appear as you type, similar to how it works in Firefox's Google search box. Google's implementation is a tad better; it can do metric conversion (try 24km in miles), but Spotlight's good for pure math.